Among the many tweaks and upgrades (and one downgrade) packed into the Xbox 360 dashboard update was one feature people aren’t very happy about: interactive TV ads.
Fortunately the clever gamers over on Reddit have come up with a solution for removing them. Redditer absurdlyobfuscated says there are many ways to do this, but he decided to use OpenDNS because it’s the easiest solution. Straight from Reddit’s intertubes:
- Sign up for an OpenDNS account (it’s free)
- Add a network for your current IP address
- Go to Advanced Settings and next to ‘Domain Typos’, check the box ‘Enable typo correction’ if it’s not already checked and apply
- Got to Web Content Filtering settings and set the filtering level to ‘None’, and under ‘Manage individual domains’, put rad.msn.com and select ‘Always block’ and then click ‘Add domain’.
- On your Xbox, go to System Settings -> Network Settings -> (your connection) -> Configure Network -> DNS settings -> Manual, and enter the OpenDNS IP addresses for the primary and secondary DNS servers: 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.
- You may need to clear your hard drive cache before ads disappear entirely: System Settings -> Storage -> Hard Drive -> press Y -> Clear System Cache (note that you’ll have to re-download any title updates for any games you play after doing this).
absurdlyobfuscated also suggests reconfiguring your router to use OpenDNS’ DNS servers via a static DNS setting. That way you don’t have to block each Xbox 360 in the house individually. Also, if your IP address changes, you will need to update your OpenDNS network to match.
Another solution for some routers is to just block the ad-serving domain. You can test to see if it worked by trying to load https://rad.msn.com/.
How to block Xbox dashboard ads [Reddit]
Davidb
Saturday, December 10, 2011 at 11:06 AMDone :) just added to my routers IAP
mattroe
Saturday, December 10, 2011 at 11:31 AMAwesome.
Sam
Saturday, December 10, 2011 at 11:56 AM“T-Pain: The King of Autotune”
That really isn’t something to be proud of….
profi
Saturday, December 10, 2011 at 3:46 PMHe’s the only artist who does it well….and is a good singer without it :)
hydrakana
Saturday, December 10, 2011 at 8:47 PMerrr….no?
Pakka
Saturday, December 10, 2011 at 12:04 PMI’d rather waste my 30 seconds typing this than wasting valuable minutes doing that just to block some advert that I’m gonna ignore and bypass anyway. Much like adverts on this site, I hardly notice them.
It sucks they put them on their on a paying service – but it’s still quite easy to do what you do on a 360 with those adverts.
Metalisticpain
Saturday, December 10, 2011 at 12:21 PMWarning iinet/Westnet/netspace/aapt customers. This would stop gaming content on Xbox being counted as freezone. Other ISP may also be affected. If Xbox traffic is not counted towards your Internet quota, changing the Dns will make the traffic count.
Stevorooni
Saturday, December 10, 2011 at 12:59 PMJust blocked it in my router settings
Jesse
Saturday, December 10, 2011 at 3:05 PMKinda pissed off that we have had to resort to this kind of bullshit.
What is the point in paying for a service if we are going to get a good dose of adverts thrown at us as well? Isn’t that the idea of an advertisement? It pays for whatever it is covering? Like the adverts on this website, free to air TV, etc?
This will do in the meantime but come on Microsoft.
Tyler
Sunday, December 11, 2011 at 1:04 PMThey should only put ads if they give you items for games/you have xbox Live Free
lol
Saturday, December 10, 2011 at 8:33 PMtl;dr
rikku45
Sunday, December 11, 2011 at 1:01 AMIm not good as stuff to do with the router :\ takes me hours to figure this out. Maybe a noob walkthrough